March is done! 51 orcs join the ranks of the resolutionists. It took me 10 days to do these guys start to finish and only one day was spent on cleaning and preparation. Compare this to the 28 bugs, which took 14 days and half that in cleaning and assembly. Old skool does pay out some dividends, sometimes.

In retrospective I probably should have left one orc out of the batch and painted him with full all the bells and whistles just to see the difference. I am not entirely happy with how these turned out but the dual pressure of time limit (I'd like to do something besides the resolutions thing each month...) and the sheer numbing amount of figures prevented that. I just couldn't risk blowing more of the month on this, I wanted them done.

To tell you the truth, this resolution thing is something of a burden. It is eating substantial portions of my painting time. Yeah, I could have weaseled out and split this into two 25-orc batches. But that's just not the kind of guy I am. Well, if I had substantial money riding on this I might have played it safe, but since I'm only really doing it to see if and how well I can do it I'd rather go with the spirit than the letter.

When I set the rules for the resolution, I thought it would help me complete new units. Now, ironically it's actually preventing me from doing that. I set the minimum batch size to 24 figures forming a coherent unit of some sort. Well, it turns out that for many possible choices I don't actually have that many figures -- they're often only 20 figures... and since the resolution requires existing figures, I can't even buy more to make up the numbers.

Let's see what April brings us. And I still have two weeks of March to do something else.

Oh, btw: The orcs are not dipped. I've found that I really don't like brown wash effect on silver weapons, so they're actually washed in two colors. I probably should have spent an extra day washing and drybrushing the skin and then doing the details instead of doing all painting first and then appying heavy washes.

maxxon